L.A. Sushi

Gregg Chadwick
L.A. Sushi
diptych 6" x 8" oil on linen 2007

ZOOM at Arena1 - Santa Monica Airport

Images by (left to right): Christian Nold, Lordy Rodriguez, Nina Katchadourian, and Joyce Kozloff.

ARENA 1 is pleased to announce the opening of a group exhibition of work exploring space and meaning through the various devices of "mapping." Working in the USA, Britain and Australia, all 19 artists in the show employ maps as resource material, not as an exploration of actual geography or the time/space continuum but rather as a matter of charting, subverting or deconstructing the very idea of mapping as a representation of the world. The artists themselves are as varied in their approach to this process as the number of directions by which we can transverse any physical position in space. Each has plotted a uniquely personal route that is fanciful, interpretive or politically driven to re-form the map of the imagination. Like the telephoto function, ZOOM +/- references a familiar orientation, then moves quickly to a point of abstraction in the artists' paintings, photographs, collages, sculptures and computer generated mappings.

For Australian artist Louisa Bufardeci “all statistical systems, linguistic systems, information systems, all systems compel and repulse me…Their artificial relationship between form and content compels me to pull them apart, twist them around, recode them and re-present them in ways that question their original form of representation and their assumptions.” Works from her “Governing Values” series utilize statistics from the CIA, the World Bank and other official fact gathering agencies with countries taking their position and size according to x and y variables such as inflation rate and life expectancy for example, to map the world’s agriculture production.

British artist Christian Nold recently completed a project at Southern Exposure as part of his on-going “Emotion Map” series which has taken him around the globe. In it he asks volunteers to use a Bio Mapping device and go for a walk in their town. The device measures the wearer's Galvanic Skin Response (GSR), which is an indicator of emotional arousal as well as their geographical location. The information is downloaded into his computer and re-produced as a map. “Emotion Maps” from San Francisco, Greenwich and Newham are shown here.

Nina Katchadourian works in video, sound, photography, paper and sculpture. She was born in Finland and lives most of the year in NYC. “Finland’s Longest Road”, is the entire length of highway E75 cut from an atlas coiled up and placed in a Petri dish where its diminutive size makes it look like an experiment. “Genealogy of the Supermarket” is a c-print of an installation she created of framed product labels mounted on striking red wallpaper. The chart “interrelates people who appear on common products in the grocery store and organizes them so that they appear to be members of one large family.”

Joyce Kozloff’s collages combine hand-drawn copies of historical battle maps with downsized, cut-out color photocopies of various warriors, all armed to the teeth. A feminist and activist, Kozloff “suggests Freud had it exactly wrong: what he should have asked is, what do boys want?” Her answer seems to be “the universality, across time and geography, of willed carnage. Kozloff's sources range from Goya and Manet to Tintin and Warhammer, but she relied most of all on drawings made by her son when he was a child.” (Nancy Princenthal, Art in America)

Ken Buhler, Sarah Trigg and Mary Hambleton are painters. Buhler’s focus on the minutiae of veins and highways in coral reefs results in richly painted images with allusions to maps radiant physical space and ability to hold and reveal multiple levels of information (including the non-visible). Trigg’s paintings project the spiritual and physical tensions between technologized culture and the natural landscape and Hambleton’s abstractions look like mappings of the heavens or molecules, with scale shifts from micro to macro. Also cosmic in outlook is the work of John Noestheden, whose crystal laden works on paper reference the patterns found in star formations as modeled in the charts and star maps that are constructed in an attempt to understand and make sense of the universe.

London-born Matthew Picton concentrates on the spaces between the cracks in his adopted state of Oregon. A blue spidery web of reinforced Dura-Lar hangs airily on a wall, belying its humble origins as the map of the cracks in a Medford alleyway. Robert Walden, from NYC, says his “Ontological Road Maps” are “a picture of time. Each drawing reveals the time it takes to make a road map and then each finished drawing actually represents that time. All along, there is a literal play on mapping. Each drawing represents a process (of mapmaking, of creating roads) and a place (a representation of existence that can be either real or imagined).” Lordy Rodriguez reconfigures the United States according to his personal experience and private fantasies using the formal conventions of maps to organize his bright, translucent colored work.

Several artists employ actual maps in their work. Doug Beube, Jeff Woodbury, Matthew Cusick and TOFU all have work based on cut up, cut out, sanded, and otherwise manipulated atlases, charts and other “mapping” tools.

Linda Ekstrom’s altered maps render the landscape and its locations as unidentifiable. Each ephemeral form has been created by cutting away the land masses on the map, leaving only the pathways of travel. “The Camps Against the Book” is an altered book with glass beads mapping out the Nazi internment and death camps from WW II.

Janice Caswell’s drawings and installations represent mental maps, an investigation of the mind's peculiar ways of organizing memories. She attempts “to trace the edges of recalled experience, plotting the movement of bodies and consciousness through time and space.”

David Brody and Douglas Henderson's computer animation and sound work, "Disobey This Command!" will be shown for the first time at ARENA 1 Gallery. Brody is a visual artist who makes paintings, wall drawings, and computer animations. Douglas Henderson is a composer whose current work is focused on multi-channel electroacoustic compositions, sound-producing sculptural installations, and scores for modern dance. Brody and Henderson, who met in New York, have long recognized certain affinities in their work, including an interest in "visual music." For Disobey, Henderson composed a sound score which responds to Brody's recursive, fractal-like visual structure.

ARENA 1 is an exhibition space founded by Santa Monica Art Studios directors Yossi Govrin and Sherry Frumkin. Based in an historic hangar at the Santa Monica Airport, ARENA 1 invites internationally known as well as newly established curators to develop innovative and compelling exhibitions.

Jesse Malin's "Broken Radio"

The role of the artist according to Jesse Malin is to put you "right there in a time and place so you can smell it."






Ryan Adams once said of his close buddy. "He's a kick-ass storyteller," the wonder boy remarked when he had just finished producing Jesse's first album. "Jesse's songs are so good they hurt my feelings. He doesn't just sound like he's singing the songs. He sounds like he IS that person."

''To say it is an insult is absurd.''

"The idea that it is some kind of calculated insult is an absurdity. The real insult - to the intelligence and decency of 'the world's 1.5 billion Muslims', for whom people such as Mohammed Ejaz ul-Haq presume to speak - comes from the ignorance and paranoia of leaders who feel so threatened by a novelist that they'll call for him to be killed."
-Hari Kunzru (author of Transmission & The Impressionist)

The noted author of The Satanic Verses, Haroun and the Sea of Stories,Midnight's Children and The Ground Beneath Her Feet has been knighted by the Queen of England and the newly minted Sir Salman has again become a lightning rod for criticism from extreme and irrational voices. Heinrich Heine's line from, "Almansor", is once again a call for constant vigilance:

"Where they have burned books, they will end in burning human beings."
("Dort, wo man Bücher verbrennt, verbrennt man am Ende auch Menschen.")
—Heinrich Heine, from his play Almansor (1821)

As an artist, a dreamer.and a creator: I stand in solidarity with Salman Rushdie and against those who would attempt to silence any true creative voice. Salman Rushdie is a man of incredible bravery. To stand alone with a pen (or word processor)against those with guns and bombs is not foolishness but instead necessity.

Salman Rushdie and his wife Padma Lakshmi

Monet's "Waterloo Bridge, Temps Couvert" Sells at Christie's for $35.6 million

Claude Monet (1840-1926)
"Waterloo Bridge, Temps Couvert"
25½" x 39 1/8" oil on canvas 1904

"I adore London, it is a mass, an ensemble, and it is so simple. What I like most of all in London is the fog. How could English painters of the nineteenth century have painted its houses brick by brick? Those fellows painted bricks that they didn't see, that they couldn't see... I so love London! But I only like it in the winter... It is the fog that gives it its marvellous breadth. Its regular, massive blocks become grandiose in this mysterious cloak."(Monet, quoted in J. House, ""Monet's London: Artists' Reflections on the Thames" 1859-1914).

The painting is one in a series of views from the Savoy Hotel that Monet painted in London in the years before World War I.
The High Museum presented a fascinating exhibit on Monet in London almost twenty years ago. The catalogue written by Grace Seiberling is well worth finding.

Manet's "A Bar at the Folies-Bergère" Graces the Getty

Édouard Manet
A Bar at the Folies-Bergère (detail) 1882
Oil on canvas
37 13/16 x 51 3/16 in.
The Samuel Courtauld Trust, Courtauld Institute of Art Gallery, London

Manet's magnificent and mysterious "A Bar at the Folies-Bergère" graces the Getty Museum in Brentwood until September 9th, 2007. Normally housed at the Courtauld Institute of Art in London in the imposing Somerset House, we are fortunate to be able to view the painting in Los Angeles.

Manet's "A Bar at the Folies-Bergère" is painted in rich buttery strokes of oil paint. The physicality of the pigment gives tangible visual weight to a scene which combines the still presence of the barmaid with the flickering mystery of the mirror behind the bar.



The Getty has placed the work in a room with a mirror on the opposite wall to help spur a dialogue between viewer and painting. We are asked a series of provacative questions on the Getty's webpage on Manet's "A Bar at the Folies-Bergère" at the Getty:

• How are we to characterize the barmaid's expression?
• What is the nature of the viewer's relationship to the barmaid?
• What is happening between the barmaid and the man reflected in the mirror?
• If we see the man's reflection in the mirror, why isn't his figure also visible in front of the bar?
• Why is there no indication in the mirror of the balcony walkway on which we imagine the man, or ourselves, to be standing?
• Why are the reflections of the figures and still life objects displaced so far to the right?

The Getty has placed the work in a room with a mirror on the opposite wall to help spur a dialogue between viewer and painting.

Few paintings have influenced my artistic process more than Manet's "A Bar at the Folies-Bergère". While studying in London I spent hours in front of the work, hoping if I gazed at the painting long enough that it would divulge its secrets.

The Getty seems to sum up my own thoughts on the work:
"The more one reflects on Manet's painting, the more difficult it becomes to project a straightforward narrative onto it, and the more conscious and uncertain we become of our position as spectators. At once invoking and undermining the traditional notion of painting-as-mirror, Manet's work becomes a profound interrogation of the act of looking itself."

If you can't find me in my studio this summer, look for me at the Getty still gazing at Manet's "A Bar at the Folies-Bergère" in a rich process of discovery and inspiration.

More at:
Manet's "A Bar at the Folies-Bergère" at the Getty
The Courtauld Collection Audiofile on Manet's "A Bar at the Folies-Bergère"

Ganesh Study

Ganesh Study
12"x9" oil on wood 2007

Listening to RB Morris' New Album- Empire

Listen to a clip from RB Morris'"Empire"

Download RB Morris' New Album "Empire" at Digstation

RB Morris has a new album out which is available as a download from Digstation. As I mentioned last year after his gig at the Getty, RB's new song "Empire" is a musical poem of political and personal hubris for our times. In early 2008 - RB Morris, Phil Cousineau and I will be leading a workshop on creativity at the Esalen Institute in Big Sur. Details to follow.

Last year I wrote that Lucinda Williams has called him the "greatest unknown songwriter in the country." Recently at the Edinburgh Castle in San Francisco, I heard RB Morris play the greatest unreleased song in the country - his post September 11th lament - "Empire ". "Empire" is a heartbreaking look at America today. It would fit right in on Neil Young's "Living With War", Pearl Jam's new album, The Dixie Chicks' new collection, Springsteen's current tour and Michael McDermott's glorious new album "Noise From Words" which is also available as a download: Download Michael McDermott's New Album "Noise From Words" at OLI

RB Morris has been described as a "hillbilly beatnik hailing from Knoxville, Tennessee, and a celebrated poet, playwright, and singer-songwriter. His songs reflect a range of musical styles from blues and country to improvisation and spoken word, but what holds them together and gives them their signature is a provocative wit and a sense of melancholy. Morris's rhythmic wordplay turns these contrary tendencies into the best of friends."

RB Morris - photo by Gregg Chadwick

The Face of Time

Green Day's Working Class Hero for Darfur

www.instantkarma.org

For the White Book on Matisse’s Table by the Dahlias, Peaches, Water Glass

For the White Book on Matisse’s Table by the Dahlias, Peaches, Water Glass

There are two kinds of love
and we’ve known both.
Two kinds of love:
the one that thrills
and one that satisfies.
Thrilling love compresses time
it speeds your heart.
The satisfying kind turns
days to summers
looks to lives.
They are two kinds, two courses
one cycle short
one long
neither engendering
the other
flowing separate
harmonious
or discordant.


Not partial to a party
my thrilling lover
may satisfy tomorrow
my satisfying love
may suddenly thrill.
We want to weave them
but always fail
for they are of
such unequal lengths
to not be
braidable.
They are played
and what we can
is tune ourselves
to each rhythm
to love each way
to thrill
to satisfy.

- Kent Chadwick

Buddha for Bamiyan

Gregg Chadwick
Buddha for Bamiyan
115" x 86" oil on linen 2007

A Child of Air Travel

Left to Right:
Diebenkorn and Sean Scully at Cantor Arts Center, Stanford University



Periodically, I visit the Cantor Arts Center at Stanford University. Recently, I was struck by the juxtaposition of Richard Diebenkorn and Sean Scully in their permanent collection. The wall label next to Sean Scully's "Angel" (illustrated above) indicates that insight may be generated by the presence of free and unburdened space. Scully calls "Angel" a child of air travel.

Golden State 111- Dallas 86

Good Night Texas!


Wayne Thiebaud
"Freeways"
oil on canvas 1979

The zeitgeist returns to California. Pelosi in D.C. The Dallas Mavericks on their way home to Texas. Santa Monica, UCLA, and the Warriors' amazing Baron Davis moves on in the NBA playoffs, while we continue to enjoy the visions of Wayne Thiebaud and Ed Ruscha.

Yakushi Nyorai (The Healing Buddha)

Gregg Chadwick
Yakushi Nyorai (The Healing Buddha)
12"x12" oil on linen 2007

From the upcoming Venice Art Walk-on May 20, 2007- which benefits the Venice Family Clinic

Great Weather, Great Art, and Great Basketball

The Bay Area has enjoyed a weekend of great weather, great art (Picasso and Brice Marden at SFMOMA) and great basketball- Baron Davis and company now are one win away from a historic playoff upset.
Davis scored 33 points as the Warriors beat the Dallas Mavericks by a score of 103-99 Sunday night and hold a 3-1 lead over the Mavs in their first-round playoff series.

Dallas Maverick's fans watch in disbelief as their team is bewitched by Baron Davis and the Golden State Warriors

Golden State's Monta Ellis

Cellist Rostropovich Dies

Mstislav Rostropovich gave an impromptu concert at Checkpoint Charlie after the Berlin Wall fell in November 1989.
photo- Reuters

Listen to an excerpt from Rostropovich's performance of Bach's Suite No. 1 in G Major: I. Prelude

Russian cellist Mstislav Rostropovich has died. He will be remembered for his music and his brave efforts to keep the arts free from censorship and tyranny. This story from the Los Angeles Times is particularly poignant:
"In July 1991, Rostropovich performed a concert in Prague to fulfill his 1968 promise to play there when the last Soviet soldier left Czechoslovakia. A month later, when he heard that hard-liners had put vacationing Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev under house arrest, seized power in Moscow and surrounded Russian Federation President Boris N. Yeltsin in the republic Parliament building, Rostropovich, at considerable personal danger, raced from Paris to Moscow, sweet-talking his way past KGB guards at the airport, to stand by Yeltsin's side.

"There was no storming of the Parliament building for one reason," a Russian youth told Rostropovich, according to the London Sunday Times, shortly after the crowd toppled a statue of Felix Dzerzhinsky, founder of the KGB. "Because you were with us."

NASA Releases 3-D Images of the Sun

An image of the full sun in 3-D. This photo was captured by SECCHI/Extreme Ultraviolet Imaging Telescope on March 20, 2007, and combines 4 different wavelengths into one image. Photo courtesy of NASA

NASA describes the program:
"STEREO (Solar TErrestrial RElations Observatory) is the third mission in NASA's Solar Terrestrial Probes program (STP). This two-year mission, launched October 2006, will provide a unique and revolutionary view of the Sun-Earth System. The two nearly identical observatories - one ahead of Earth in its orbit, the other trailing behind - will trace the flow of energy and matter from the Sun to Earth. They will reveal the 3D structure of coronal mass ejections; violent eruptions of matter from the sun that can disrupt satellites and power grids, and help us understand why they happen. STEREO will become a key addition to the fleet of space weather detection satellites by providing more accurate alerts for the arrival time of Earth-directed solar ejections with its unique side-viewing perspective."

3-D images, known as anaglyphs, combine left and right eye images
The 3-D image can be seen with red and cyan 3-D paper glasses.


A close-up of loops in a magnetic active region is shown in this false color image taken on December 4, 2006.
Photo courtesy of NASA

More at :
NASA - STEREO

Orange and Maroon Effect

Mark Rothko
Untitled (Seagram Mural), 1959
Gift of The Mark Rothko Foundation, Inc.
Copyright © 1997 Christopher Rothko and Kate Rothko Prizel
National Gallery of Art, Washington DC

Sometimes a painting will seem to carry the weight of the moment solely by means of color or form. Mark Rothko wanted his paintings to convey the depth of myth and the struggles of humanity. Richard Lacayo at Time also had an urge to turn to Rothko after the shootings at VirginiaTech. Lacayo only recently learned how to "see" Rothko and has discovered what Rothko was up to: " I understood that all those hovering fog banks of color weren’t gateways to anything, they were emblems of thwarted longing. Rothko was trying to invoke the power of myth, even the power of God, all the while knowing that he could summon those things, but they might not come. Would not, more likely."


VirginiaTech ~ Rothko

VirginiaTech ~ In Memoriam ~ Lacayo

VirginiaTech ~ In Memoriam

We are Virginia Tech.

We are sad today, and we will be sad for quite a while. We are not moving on, we are embracing our mourning.

We are Virginia Tech.

We are strong enough to stand tall tearlessly, we are brave enough to bend to cry, and we are sad enough to know that we must laugh again.

We are Virginia Tech.

We do not understand this tragedy. We know we did nothing to deserve it, but neither does a child in Africa dying of AIDS, neither do the invisible children walking the night away to avoid being captured by the rogue army, neither does the baby elephant watching his community being devestated for ivory, neither does the Mexican child looking for fresh water, neither does the Appalachian infant killed in the middle of the night in his crib in the home his father built with his own hands being run over by a boulder because the land was destabilized. No one deserves a tragedy.

We are Virginia Tech.

The Hokie Nation embraces our own and reaches out with open heart and hands to those who offer their hearts and minds. We are strong, and brave, and innocent, and unafraid. We are better than we think we are and not quite what we want to be. We are alive to the imaginations and the possibilities. We will continue to invent the future through our blood and tears and through all our sadness.

We are the Hokies.

We will prevail.
We will prevail.
We will prevail.

We are Virginia Tech.

-- Nikki Giovanni, University Distinguished Professor, poet, activist




VirginiaTech ~ Nikki Giovanni
VirginiaTech ~ In Memoriam

Jackie Robinson Day

Jackie Robinson during his collegiate years in Los Angeles

"A life is not important except in the impact it has on other lives."
-Jackie Robinson

Today marks the 60th anniversary of Jackie Robinson's first game for the Brooklyn Dodgers. Jackie Robinson was the first African-American baseball player to compete in the major leagues when he joined the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1947.

Across the United States, players from each major league baseball team will wear tributes to Jackie Robinson. Every player on the Los Angeles Dodgers will wear Jackie Robinson’s No. 42 today. Bill Pennington of the New York Times explains that the movement to honor Jackie's memory began with a suggestion from the Cincinnati Red's Ken Griffey Jr. -

"Sixty years after Jackie Robinson shook the baseball establishment and broke the sport’s color barrier, an unforeseen grassroots movement by today’s players has suddenly shaped the way Major League Baseball will commemorate the anniversary. More than 200 players will wear Robinson’s No. 42 retired by baseball 10 years ago in ballparks across the country on Sunday, the anniversary of Robinson’s first appearance with the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1947.

While the tribute has received baseball’s approval, it grew spontaneously from a request by the Cincinnati Reds’ Ken Griffey Jr., who asked Commissioner Bud Selig earlier this month if he could wear the number on April 15. What has evolved since is surprisingly organic for a group of famous, feted athletes with multimillion-dollar contracts.

As word of Griffey’s gesture spread, small groups of players — among them stars like Barry Bonds, Dontrelle Willis and Gary Sheffield — decided also to wear 42 that day. Soon, there was a representative from every team. The Los Angeles Dodgers then decided to have their entire roster wear 42.

Now, there are six major league teams that plan to have everyone in uniform wearing No. 42 — players, coaches, manager and bat boys. Those teams are the Dodgers, the St. Louis Cardinals, the Pittsburgh Pirates, the Philadelphia Phillies, the Milwaukee Brewers and the Houston Astros."


-The Dodgers are one of six big league teams whose every player will wear Jackie Robinson’s No. 42 today
(Gina Ferazzi / L.A. Times )

The New York Yankees Derek Jeter will also wear Jackie Robinson's #42 today and he stated to the press, "I am so proud to honor this man who opened the doors for blacks to have an opportunity to play in the major leagues alongside everyone else."



Rachel Robinson, Jackie's wife, still has vivid memories of April 15, 1947:

"As Jackie Robinson was getting ready to break baseball's color barrier with the Brooklyn Dodgers, Rachel was hustling to get to Ebbets Field in time to see it."

"She waited a long time for a taxi because drivers routinely passed up black passengers. She worried their baby, Jackie Jr., would be cold because she had dressed him in spring clothes. And she stopped at a hot dog stand in the ballpark, where a vendor was kind enough to heat the boy's bottle."


Rachel Robinson at the stadium. (From Spike Lee's documentary on Baseball and Jackie Robinson)

"It was an exciting, exhilarating time — but it also was a stressful time," Rachel Robinson said.
Rachel and Jackie met while they both were students at UCLA. Rachel Robinson earned a degree in nursing from the UCSF School of Nursing in 1945 before marrying Jackie in 1946. A few years after Jackie Robinson's retirement from baseball, Rachel returned to school and earned a masters degree from New York University. In 1965 Rachel became an Assistant Professor of Nursing at Yale University.


-Jackie Robinson during his collegiate years at UCLA played football, ran track, was the leading scorer on the basketball team and played baseball.



More on Jackie Robinson and Rachel Robinson at:

L.A. Times on Jackie Robinson Day

Los Angeles Dodgers Site on Jackie Robinson

New York Times on Jackie Robinson

Rachel Robinson at UCSF

A Different Eakins Sold to Wal-Mart Heiress's Crystal Bridges

Eakins’ “Portrait of Professor Benjamin H. Rand” (1874), sold to Alice Walton’s Arkansas museum.
The painting is destined for the new Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, now under construction in Bentonville, Arkansas.

Carol Vogel in the New York Times is reporting that Thomas Jefferson University in Philadelphia has been at it again in their attempt to sell an Eakins to Crystal Bridges. This time it is Thomas Eakin's portrait of Benjamin Howard Rand. "Less than four months after Philadelphians thwarted its bid to buy “The Gross Clinic,” an 1875 masterpiece by Thomas Eakins, an Arkansas museum founded by the Wal-Mart heiress Alice L. Walton has quietly purchased another much-loved Eakins painting from the Philadelphia medical school that sold the first."

Michael Kimmelman describes the painting:

"A tour de force from 1874 -Benjamin Howard Rand- a chemistry professor whom Eakins knew as a teacher from his school days. He sits, reading and distractedly stroking a cat (an echo of Manet’s “Olympia” perhaps) at a desk almost comically crammed with microscopes, test tubes, quills and papers. Raking light picks out, like flashes of colored fireworks, the polished brass instruments, a pink rose and a woman’s afghan draped over a chair before the desk. The cat stares at us. Professor Rand remains absorbed in his book.

"At the Centennial, where Eakin's “The Gross Clinic” was banished to the medical tent for being too graphic, critics praised the Rand painting as more than a portrait because of the still life of objects in it. Now it seems brilliant but anecdotal."

In Memory: Sol LeWitt at SFMOMA

No Fear of Beauty: Sol LeWitt in San Francisco

"Artists are mystics rather than rationalists. They leap to conclusions that logic cannot reach."
--Sol LeWitt, 1969

Sol LeWitt's retrospective, which ran from February 19, 2000 - May 21, 2000 at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art was a revelation. The timing of the exhibition was deeply personal for me. It was the end of one phase of my life, an introduction to a new path, and ultimately a springboard -both personally and artistically- to a new world.

Sol LeWitt's life work as laid out in SFMOMA's exhibition was intellectually stimulating and ravishingly beautiful. This was an artist who was deeply serious, yet who had no fear of beauty.


Sol LeWitt
"Cube-Circle 4"
wall drawing
from Sol LeWitt: New Wall Drawings & Photographs at the Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco which ran from Sep 9 - Oct 30, 2004
"I would like to produce something I would not be ashamed to show Giotto."
--Sol LeWitt, 1980's

"Born in 1928 in Hartford, Connecticut, LeWitt moved to New York in 1953, just as Abstract Expressionism was beginning to gain public recognition and was dominating contemporary art. He found various jobs to support himself, first in the design department at Seventeen magazine, doing paste-ups, mechanicals, and photostats, and later, for the young architect I.M. Pei as a graphic designer. This contact proved formative, for as LeWitt would later write, "an architect doesn't go off with a shovel and dig his foundation and lay every brick. He's still an artist."
-from the SFMOMA website created for the Sol LeWitt retrospective which ran from February 19, 2000 - May 21, 2000.

Sol LeWitt at SFMOMA


Sol LeWitt
Wall Drawing at Crown Point Press, 657 Howard St Entrance.

Sol LeWitt's essay "Paragraphs on Conceptual Art", from 1967, provided a clear explanation of his artistic aims:
"No matter what form it may finally have it must begin with an idea."
"When an artist uses a conceptual form of art, it means that all of the planning and decisions are made beforehand and the execution is a perfunctory affair. The idea becomes a machine that makes the art."

The SFMOMA site on the Sol LeWitt exhibition explains, "In 1960 LeWitt took a job at The Museum of Modern Art, working first at the book counter and later as a night receptionist. He met other young artists working there (Dan Flavin, Robert Mangold, Robert Ryman, and Scott Burton), placing him in the midst of a community of young artists searching for a new direction."

Other artists were important to Sol LeWitt. As Tyler Green points out: "Stories of LeWitt's generosity to other artists and to the art world are everywhere. In addition to supporting groups such as Printed Matter, for years LeWitt traded work with near any artist who wanted to trade with him. He kept the works he received in a warehouse near his home, in Chester, Conn. He sent his collection of contemporary art around the country, mostly to small museums that have limited access to top new art."

LeWitt most often used assistants to execute the works based upon his detailed instructions.

Below are LeWitt's instructions for the execution of Wall Drawing #340, 1980:

"Six-part drawing. The wall is divided horizontally and vertically into six equal parts. 1st part: On red, blue horizontal parallel lines, and in the center, a circle within which are yellow vertical parallel lines; 2nd part: On yellow, red horizontal parallel lines, and in the center, a square within which are blue vertical parallel lines; 3rd part: On blue, yellow horizontal parallel lines, and in the center, a triangle within which are red vertical parallel lines; 4th part: On red, yellow horizontal parallel lines, and in the center, a rectangle within which are blue vertical parallel lines; 5th part: On yellow, blue horizontal parallel lines, and in the center, a trapezoid within which are red vertical parallel lines; 6th part: On blue, red horizontal parallel lines, and in the center, a parallelogram within which are yellow vertical parallel lines. The horizontal lines do not enter the figures."


Sol LeWitt Wall Drawing in the Lobby at SFMOMA

LeWitt's work strikes a delicate balance between the physical work and the idea. His wall drawings begin with a series of mathematical calculations laid out on papers, which are crafted into precise yet open instructions that a team of collaborators executes.

LeWitt's massive, vibrant wall drawings are like Renaissance frescoes in their ability to create a new kind of space which is both painting and architecture.


Sol LeWitt Wall Drawing in the Lobby at SFMOMA

Even though LeWitt used industrial materials that he felt would erase any trace of craft and employed assistants to execute his ideas, the importance of the artist's hand is still evident in the subtle shifts in color and line in the wall drawings. LeWitt's desire to adhere to a system did not negate his wish to create truly beautiful wall drawings. As the artist said in the early 1980s, "I would like to produce something I would not be ashamed to show Giotto."

More at:

Tyler Green
Video: Sol LeWitt Makes a Drawing from SFMOMA*

*The interactive media works created by SFMOMA'S education department are consistently remarkable. Artist,
Tim Svenonius, is deeply involved in many of these projects, including his work on the groundbreaking discovery of an early Picasso found hidden under SFMOMA's "Street Scene" painted by Picasso in 1900


Hidden Picasso Under SFMOMA's "Street Scene" painted by Picasso in 1900.

Interactive Site: SFMOMA's Hidden Picasso
Tim Svenonius Site



Painting in SFMOMA lobby
photo by Clay Vajgrt

A Trinity of Light - L.A.

I am re-reading Lawrence Weschler's volume of essays: "Vermeer in Bosnia." Weschler's piece on the light of L.A. resonates:

The architect Coy Howard, a true student of the light explains:
"Things in the light here have a kind of threeness instead of the usual twoness. There's the thing -the object- and its shadow, but then a sense of reflection as well. You know how you can be walking along the beach ... and you'll see a seagull walking along ahead of you, and a wave comes in, splashing its feet. At this moment, you'll see the bird, its shadow, and its reflection. Well, there's something about the environment here - the air, the atmosphere, the light - that makes everything shimmer. There's a kind of glowing thickness to the world - the diaphonous soup- which in turn, grounds a magic-meditative sense of presence."



Icons From Sinai

School of Los Angeles

Update: RB Kitaj Exits


R.B. Kitaj at Hammer Museum

RB Kitaj presented a lecture on his art at the Hammer Museum on Thursday, March 8, 2007


R.B. Kitaj
Los Angeles no. 20 1990-2003
Collection of the National Gallery of Australia

"Don't listen to the fools who say either that pictures of people can be of no consequence or that painting is finished. There is much to be done. It matters what men of good will want to do with their lives."
-RB Kitaj

We are fortunate to have Kitaj back in Los Angeles. Much like Alex and Jane Eliot, Kitaj should be declared a living national treasure. Almost thirty years ago Kitaj curated an exhibition, for the Arts Council of Great Britain, entitled The Human Clay. Let me be the first to propose a new exhibition incorporating Kitaj's School of London with our new - School of L.A.

The School of London - School of L. A. connection is a natural one with Kitaj and Hockney working here and inspiring a whole new generation of artists. In the catalog essay for the original Human Clay exhibition, Kitaj wrote, "If some of the strange and fascinating personalities you may encounter here were given a fraction of the internationalist attention and encouragement reserved in this barren time for provincial and orthodox vanguardism, a School of London might become even more real than the one I have construed in my head. " Substitute Los Angeles for London, and the above sentence supports the brave efforts of many, including Caryn Coleman's and Mark Vallen's mission to encourage the development of a vital art press in Los Angeles.

As artists, gallerists, curators, writers and collectors, we need to come together and refuse to accept the status quo.
I hope that this School of L.A. which I have construed in my head, will become real. RB Kitaj - we need you.


R.B. Kitaj Lectures at Hammer Museum